June 2, 2025 - It Takes Two to Tango Bill starts by sharing tunes with two musical lines, where one line goes up while the other goes down to create a counter melody, to complex sonatas like Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata for violin and piano. This week will feature remarkable performances of musicians working in tandem playing Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. We’ll also savor the great love duets of Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner. Oh, don’t miss the meowing cat duets of Rossini and Ravel.
June 9, 2025 - Giuseppe Verdi, Part I (1813-1901) This week we begin a ten-part series surveying the life and music of Giuseppe Verdi, a towering figure in Italian art and perhaps the greatest composer of nineteenth-century opera. We'll explore the nooks and crannies of Verdi's repertoire, including a trip to Medieval Spain, Shakespeare's Scotland, and even France! Despite Verdi being known for his work in opera, an art form intimately connected with language, his music transcends words. To end our first week on Verdi, we will listen to his overtures and as Bill would say, "Man, that boy wrote a lot of music!"
June 16, 2025 - Giuseppe Verdi, Part II (1813-1901) Join us for the second part of our series featuring Verdi with more of his operas and other works, both iconic and underappreciated. Verdi takes on Italian painters, Egyptian princesses, and composes perhaps the grandest requiem ever written. Rumor has it that at Verdi's funeral, a hundred thousand voices rose in song as Arturo Toscanini conducted the “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves” from his opera Nabucco.
June 23, 2025 - Bushel of Fifths Bill says this is not a bushel of whiskey or carrots but a remarkable number of big symphonies that bear the number five. Consider the fifth symphonies of Beethoven, Mahler, Sibelius, and Shostakovich, and we will not run out! The first few symphonies a composer writes are complicated, but by the fifth symphony, they know how to construct it and what they want to say in the music. Most of these symphonies are composed at the mid-point in a composer's life, although our first composer, Franz Schubert, was only 16 when he wrote his Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major. We will listen to great orchestras conducted by Karl Böhm, Herbert von Karajan, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Eugene Ormandy.
June 30, 2025 - Sounds of the City of Light Music in Paris from Hector Berlioz to Claude Debussy, spanning from 1830 to the early 1900s. Paris, known as the City of Light, is illuminated by many musical stars. No time was this more true than in this period between Berlioz’s birth and Debussy's death. In this edition of Exploring Music, Bill McGlaughlin discovers what made luminaries such as Georges Bizet, Charles Gounod, and Charles-Valentin Alkan shine.
